These thoughts are not completely thought out, but one of the great things about blogging is that one can throw out half-baked ideas and create a discussion.
There was a great thread of comments following my startup school post, and rather coincidentally, Nick Carr has a new post on the commercialization of open source that also raises some interesting parallels.
I have always felt that the biotech sector is the result of the hard work of an army of poorly paid highly-skilled workers (postdocs) and graduate students. PIs provide the environment which allows these people to flourish, and I believe that’s where the change needs to come. If we move to a more distributed research environment, with less tightly coupled funding models, then can we start thinking of these groups of postdocs, grad students, PIs and others as the equivalent of a gathering of professionals working to develop new ideas in an academic setting (the analogy of open source), but with a good understanding of how their efforts could be scaled up (once again, commercialization is not the only end goal here, but scaling should be, especially for more widely relevant science). In other words, will academic science as practiced today move from being almost a volunteer project to a more actionable endeavor.
As someone who believes in the purity of tinkering, of exploratory science, the cool part is not everyone needs to go this way and most projects will probably start as people trying to discover things, but what happens when you do? How do you scale up? How to you prove that an idea can be commercialized if you think that’s a possibility? Most PIs and postdocs have no clue how to write a business plan? They don’t understand marketing. I doubt they usually have an idea of the market potential. What they do have is ideas and innovative capabilities. That’s what I am trying to understand. How do we increase the impact of this innovation, how can we reward the innovators via different business models and perhaps most importantly, how can we have an impact greater than what we probably have at this time.
Some day I will pen these thoughts down in the wiki and try and write an essay on where we might/should ends up. In the meantime, you get to read and comment on partially thought out concepts.
Image via Wikipedia
Technorati Tags: Open Source, Commercialization, Business Models
5 Comments
Deepak,
By asking how do we reward innovators by business models, you are making an inherent assumption that these innovators are there for monetary rewards. In fact, many are not all that worried about monetary rewards. What we need is an environment where innovators who want to build a business on top of their work should be able to do it easily and those who are not interested in monetary benefits should be able to continue with what they want to do and anyone who builds a business on top of the work done by these people should be made to contribute back to this environment so that the second group of people continue with their innovation without worrying or getting affected by the commercialization of their work. I hope you get what I am trying to convey here.
Krish
Completely agree with you actually. Reward does not have to be monetary in an academic context. However, the models that enable what you suggest need a serious refresh
I completely agree with you on that. It needs a complete revamp to reduce the friction between academia and industry.
A slightly different angle is that the problems/big questions that can be more easily tackled given current technologies and foreseeable advances are not readily accessible. Exciting and clearly stated research agendas would attract this distributed research environment.
A slightly different angle is that the problems/big questions that can be more easily tackled given current technologies and foreseeable advances are not readily accessible. Exciting and clearly stated research agendas would attract this distributed research environment.
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